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If the newspapers and grant-seeking boffins are to be believed, it's only a matter of time before an enormous lump of rock comes hurtling out of the heavens and puts a serious downer on everbody's day.

Not satisfied with having wiped out the dinosaurs, asteroids are apparently hungry to inflict more terrestrial mayhem - and next time humanity itself could be on the menu.

We're obliged, therefore, to the Department of Planetary Sciences at the University of Arizona which has developed a handy programme to calculate to what extent said apocalypse will immediately effect you, the innocent bystander.

The Impact Effects programme allows you to enter parameters such as your distance from impact, size of asteroid, etc. You then get told what happens next. Intrigued, we decided let the "impactometer" calculate the effect of a 50m ball of rock falling on not-too-distant Shenfield (a commuter town in Essex's commuter hinterland in need of "redevelopment" - asteroids take note):

Distance from impact: 50km

Projectile diameter: 50m

Projectile density: 3000kg/m3 (dense rock)

Impact velocity: 17 km/s (average for an asteroid, apparently)

Impact angle: 15

Target density: 1500kg/m3 (porous rock)

The programme then offered us the following:

Energy:

2.84 x 1016 Joules = 6.78 MegaTons TNT

The average interval between impacts of this size somewhere on Earth is 480.1 years